


darkness to a dying flame

by littleleotas



Category: Addams Family (TV 1964), Addams Family - All Media Types
Genre: Autumn, Capital R Romantic, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 16:43:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20951597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleleotas/pseuds/littleleotas
Summary: A character study of Morticia Addams.





	darkness to a dying flame

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Morticia liked predictability. She liked the certainty that knit one, purl one, repeat from eventually made a new sweater for a beloved cousin, that a drop of arsenic and a dash of nightshade made a perfectly balanced henbane soup. She complained that no matter what she did those horrid petals grew back on her lovely thorn stems, but she knew if the petals ever stopped coming in she’d be alarmed and bewildered.

People seemed to think her life was more unpredictable than it was. Her sister Ophelia’s instability was in itself predictable, and she wasn’t sure why she seemed to be the only one who saw it. On their way to the Addams house with her sister and their mother, she already knew exactly how it would play out. Ophelia would fall madly in love in a moment, as she always did; she fell in love with the idea of being in love. And this new suitor would fall for her adoration, then run from the obsessive nature to which that adoration gave way.

Gomez didn’t fall, though. Not for Ophelia. It was the only truly unpredictable thing he ever did.

Her hands felt whole with sharp objects in them: her knitting needles, her gardening shears, a fencing foil. She learned fencing as if memorising a dance, a series of movements all prescribed in their proper order. Lunge, quarte, feint—beat, a punishment for the feint—envelopment, circle sixte, riposte, point, “querida,” “bubele,” corps-à-corps. A more conniving fencer than Gomez could easily exploit her routine, but Gomez had no interest in keeping score. There were no competitive sports in the Addams household—only opportunities to create something beautiful together.

That might seem to some a paradox: beauty in predictability. It made perfect sense to Morticia, though. Gomez remarked once that she looked ravishing in black, and she replied, “I’ll never wear anything else,” and she meant it. A wardrobe full of black dresses meant she could count on cigar-scented kisses up her arm and on her neck every day. It lent her own perfume a tinge of brimstone, she thought. The final touch on her daily toilette.

In the autumn, the smell of smoke seemed to linger in the air outside as well as in. Instead of cigar smoke, it smelled of the decaying earth set alight: leaves, wood, dirt. The trees burst into the living colour of death, dripping blood red and candle-flame orange and decomposition yellow in the leaves that whirled in a Viennese waltz to the ground, where they would rot, and turn back into earth, and live on again. How full of love the wet, grey sky seemed to her, to darken itself and better showcase the danse macabre of the dying earth; how joyous the thrill of cold rain on her pale face upturned toward the thick, comforting clouds that seemed to enclose the world in a cosy little box.

All things must, unfortunately, bloom before being granted the grace to become part of the marvellous dance of dying. Morticia wondered, sometimes, if it was selfish of them to grasp at the dark so early, but Gomez, with his boundless joy and enthusiasm, always convinced her that there is never a time when it is right to shun beauty, there is never a time when it is right to temper love. It is the greatest happiness of living that one has the opportunity to fill the world with the eternal pulchritude of the darkness and spend every day truly appreciating the fleeting advantages of flesh and blood. Life, Gomez reminded her, is a gifted opportunity to create and celebrate and love with one’s own hands, to draw the magic of worlds together, to combine the exhilaration of living with the exquisite beauty of death.

Living in the bubble of love and beauty they had created for themselves made it easy to forget not everyone understood the world as clearly as they did. Some unfortunate souls called them naive, some said ‘optimistic’ as if it were an insult. Living surrounded by darkness, one’s eyes adjust to it; there are no secrets hidden from the night’s own denizens. For those who see in the dark, there is merely truth. It is easy to forget how the light blinds. If people in the light lie, cheat, steal, harm, and hide, it is only the misfortune of misunderstanding; of course people squinting in the light can’t see the true nature of the world that the Addamses could see. The knowledge of the goodness of the world was a comfort they knew they were fortunate to possess.

Perhaps it was less predictability that she liked and more dependability. Predictability seemed to carry an air of negativity with it: a disappointment at the loss of possibility. Mama and her crystal ball were more interested in prediction; Morticia didn’t worry so much about spelling out what would be. It was the dependability of the important things that gave her the confidence to tackle the things she could not predict. She could depend on thunderstorms in autumn, the sparkle in Gomez’s eyes whenever he looked at her, and her foolproof recipe for henbane soup, and that was as much as she needed. She knew the ending—two graves side-by-side in the family cemetery—and she knew the ending was only another beginning; everything else, predictable or unpredictable, was manageable with that on which she could depend.

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely can't remember which weapon they fence in the show but in this the Addamses fence foil because I fence foil and that's what I know. Sue me.
> 
> I'm on Pillowfort and Twitter as littleleotas!


End file.
